Homegrown audio content platform Kuku FM on Thursday announced that it has raised USD 19.5 million in series B round led by South Korean gaming giant Krafton. The round also saw participation from new investors including Founder Bank Capital and Verlinvest as well as existing investors 3one4 Capital, Vertex Ventures, and India Quotient. With 6 million active paid users, Kuku FM said it will use the funds to drive expansion and strengthen its content.
Founded in 2018 by Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena and Vikas Goyal, Kuku FM provides content creation tools to its users enabling them to create, develop and post content. The Mumbai-headquartered company offers content in five languages (Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati) and hosts 150,000 hours of content across audiobooks, stories, book summaries, courses and podcasts on its platform.
With 30,000 creators, 50 per cent of the content is exclusive to the platform and only available on Kuku FM.
“We strongly believe that Indian IPs and regional Indian languages content growth will unlock next big monetisation opportunity not just in India but even globally in the long term,” said Sean Hyunil Sohn, Head of India Division at Krafton. Krafton owns PUBG Studios, Bluehole Studio, Striking Distance Studios, RisingWings, Dreamotion and Unknown Worlds.
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“We have seen an unprecedented consumption of audio content amongst users in our country with 70% users coming from Tier 2 cities. With this momentum, we are confident about hitting 10 million active paid users by the end of this year and 50 million paid users by 2025,” said Kuku FM CEO Lal Chand Bisu.
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